Requirements

• you need to have npm and git installed on your machine.
• you need a Clever Cloud account with at least a validated email to benefit the free credits.

Setting up our MDX-Deck

$ mkdir presentation //creating a new folder
$ cd presentation
$ git init // creating fresh git folder
$ npm init //creating new project

"main": "index.js",

"scripts": {
    "start": "mdx-deck deck.mdx",
    "build": "mdx-deck build deck.mdx",
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
},

# Congratulations!

---

## You're up and live on Clever Cloud!

---

Deploy to clever cloud as static with hooks

Explanation

In my last article I created a simple Canvas workpad in my Kibana. To do so I already had meetup data indexed in my Elastic instance. Today I am going to tell you how I did gather data and added it to Elasticsearch.

Selecting meetups I want to track

The first thing to do is to select a list of meetup groups you want to keep track of. There are many ways to do that using the Meetup API. For instance, you can search to similar groups using the similar_groups endpoint. I let you read the API documentation to find a way to select the events you will track. You just need to format the response to extract the cities and the names of the Meetups groups in a JSON file formatted as follows:

{
  "City name 1": [
    "meetup group name 1",
    "meetup group name 2",
    ...
  ],
  "City name 2": [
    "meetup group name 1",
    ...
  ]
}

Getting data about meetup events

Once you have this, you can use the node.js application we created. Of course it has the Elasticsearch dependency in package.json. You are strongly invited to check out the source code at this point. You can see in the index.js many parts of interest:

• The creation of an express server listening on port 8080. We need it, so Clever Cloud will know our app is up running.

app.get('/', (req, res) => {
    res.send('Hello !');
});
app.listen(8080, () => console.log('Listening on port 8080!')); 

• The meetup API call:

axios.get(`https://api.meetup.com/${meetupName}/events/?status=past,upcoming\&fields=comment_count`)

• the creation of Elasticsearch indexes:

await client.indices.create({
  index: "meetup",
  body : {
    "mappings": {
      "properties": {
        "time":  {"type": "date", "format": "epoch_millis"},
        "group.name": {"type": "keyword"},
        "yes_rsvp_count" : {"type": "integer"},
        "grouploc": {"type": "geo_point"},
        "venueloc":{"type": "geo_point"}
      }
    }
  }
});

• The creation of another server where our meetup API calls happen, listening on port 8081. We can also notice that we've restricted our server to allow only localhost connections.

localapp.listen(8081, 'localhost', function() {
  console.log("... port %d in %s mode", 8081, localapp.settings.env);

Now in ./clevercloud/cron.json you can notice a cron task, wich will trigger a curl on http://localhost:8081/ every night at 1 AM:

"0 1 * * * /usr/host/bin/curl http://localhost:8081/"

It is this cron that will call our second server to trigger the meetup API calls.

True fact: to use it in its current version, you must keep your application running all the time for one hour of usage maximum. A way to improve the application regarding this issue would be to implement authentication to our application, so we still are the only one having access.

Then remove the cron from this project to have it running in your main application instead. Your main application will be the one consuming this indexed data. Taking advantage on the fact that every virtual machine running on Clever Cloud already has the Clever Tools CLI installed, we could improve our cron to start the application for an hour then stop it when it has finished its indexation job.

So you will end up with two machines, one with your main application, and the second one running for one hour each night.

We must also know that Clever Cloud does not monitor what's going on on port 8081. You could add a logging system or use Elastic APM to monitor your application during its execution time.

This is an approach among many others, do not hesitate to talk with us about your own implementation.

Okay, let's go back to our main goal, and to do so, you can use our sample data meetup list or use your own by replacing the json in the meetups.jsonfile.

Try it out

You can $ git clone the repo in your console, and go into your Clever Cloud console.

Under the organization of your choice, select New, Application, Node. When prompted if you need add-ons, select Elastic Stack, select the plan you need and enable Kibana as an option.

In the environment variables menu of your application, add NODE_ENV=production and add the provided clever remote to your local git folder. Then push using git push -u clever master.

Your deployment will start and thanks to the ES_ADDON_URI we provided in our index.js file, we have nothing else to configure, our application will start sending data to elastic.

Visualize your data and go further

Either in your Kibana or Elastic instance menu in the Clever Cloud console, in the information page you will find a Open Kibana button. Click it and login using your Clever Cloud credentials.

Into Kibana click on the Management (gear) icon in the left side menu. Under the Kibana title, select Index Patterns, then meetup* to see how the data is indexed.

Of course at this point, you are able to do the exact same as I did in the previous article video.

Here is the ElasticSQL query I used in the Canvas demonstration:

SELECT AVG("yes_rsvp_count") AS average, "group.name" FROM "meetup*"
GROUP BY "group.name"
ORDER BY average DESC
LIMIT 5

Happy indexing!

Yesterday I started talking with a partner on how we would collaborate. I just wanted an IM so I invited them on our Gitter and Slack. But they don't use any of these solutions. They use IRC. Which is great but then I did not have any logger or private server around. And being most of the time on the go, I have no stable connection. I need this logger. So I deployed one on Clever Cloud. This is how I did it.

How to deploy The Lounge

Googling my way through a nice solution called The Lounge. It's in their word:

“The self-hosted web IRC client.
Always connected.”

So it allows me to connect to a server, and can act as a logger too. And it works on mobile as a PWA. Always a nice plus. It's written in JavaScript and uses SQLLite for persistence. In Clever Cloud terms, it means I will need a Node.JS runtime to run the server and an FS-Bucket addon to store files. Here's how I have deployed everything.

git clone https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge.git
cd thelounge
clever create --type node thelounge
clever env set NODE_ENV production
clever addon create fs-bucket --plan s fsLounge
clever service link-addon fsLounge
clever env set THELOUNGE_HOME /app/home/
clever env set CC_FS_BUCKET /home:bucket-84d43724-d8ff-44a3-a4d9-053c45c3a5e4-fsbucket.services.clever-cloud.com
clever env set CC_PRE_RUN_HOOK 'yarn build && cp ./config.js /app/home/config.js'
clever env set NODE_BUILD_TOOL yarn

To configure it you can copy the default configuration in the home directory. First I have copied the default conf at the project root: cp defaults/config.js ./config.js

I then edited ./config.js to change the port to 8080. If you look at the CC_PRE_RUN_HOOK variable you can see the file will be copied in the home directory define in the environment variable THELOUNGE_HOME. Do not forget to commit your changes!

If you want to know exactly what you can configure you can take a look at their documentation.

Now we should be all good to go so one last command and The Lounge will be online: clever deploy

From now on you should see the deployment logs. Once it's over and you see success, type clever open and it will open the Lounge in your default web brower.

If you haven't change the default config you should be prompted with a Login screen. We do have to create a user. To do so they have a CLI tool. Or you can configure an LDAP server or another supported user directory. We will use the CLI tool. Fastest way to do this is to ssh to your instance by typing clever ssh.

From there you can cd into the directory of the application and type node index list to see the current users. As expected there are none. So go ahead and type node index add username. You will be prompted for a password. The user will be created and now you can login :) Here is my terminal output for these operations:

bas@35e83ff3-f546-4c93-8c1d-c564d6f8673f ~ $ cd app_1ae60928-cb87-4c73-8e74-44ffd7b6e49a/
bas@35e83ff3-f546-4c93-8c1d-c564d6f8673f ~/app_1ae60928-cb87-4c73-8e74-44ffd7b6e49a $ node index list
2019-01-16 16:24:48 [INFO] There are currently no users. Create one with thelounge add <name>.
bas@35e83ff3-f546-4c93-8c1d-c564d6f8673f ~/app_1ae60928-cb87-4c73-8e74-44ffd7b6e49a $ node index add ldoguin
2019-01-16 16:24:52 [PROMPT] Enter password: 
2019-01-16 16:24:56 [PROMPT] Save logs to disk? (yes) 
2019-01-16 16:24:58 [INFO] User ldoguin created.
2019-01-16 16:24:58 [INFO] User file located at /app/home/users/ldoguin.json.

And that's it now you have your own IRC client, always online, that works on mobile and support push notifications. If you want to go further you can add your own domain name and you will have automatic SSL support thanks to our Let's encrypt automatic integration. You can also spend some time on TheLounge website and look at the different themes you can install or how to change the CSS. Happy Hacking!